Introduction

1. The Author

Innocent of Kherson was born Ivan Alekseevich Borisov in 1800, in the town of Elets in Orel Province, the son of a parish priest attached to the Dormition church. He was schooled first at the Voronezh spiritual school and then at the Orel seminary at Sevsk before entering the Kiev Theological Academy, where by his own account he gave himself to study with a nearly consuming intensity, often working through the night, and found himself drawn above every other subject to homiletics—the discipline of composing and refining a sermon. He completed the Academy course in 1823 at the head of his class, was tonsured a monk under the name Innocent, and was ordained deacon and then priest that same year.

The following decade carried him through the ordinary stations of a gifted young churchman of his era: a lectureship at the St. Petersburg Theological Seminary, then a teaching post and eventually the rectorship of the Alexander Nevsky Theological School, and from there back to Kiev as inspector, professor, and—by 1830, the year in which he was also awarded the degree of Doctor of Theology—rector of the Kiev Theological Academy, a post he held for roughly a decade. In 1836 he was consecrated Bishop of Chigirin; in 1845 he was raised to archbishop; and in 1848 he was appointed to the see of Kherson and Tavria, where he remained until his death. In that diocese he pursued the recovery of Chersonesus as the traditional site of the baptism of St. Vladimir, founding a monastery there in 1850 and restoring several older monastic houses across the Crimean peninsula.

It was as a preacher that Innocent became widely known. He spoke without notes, at length, to congregations that grew rather than thinned as he went on, and his cycles of sermons for Passion Week and for Bright (Easter) Week were copied and read across Russia in his own lifetime. The comparison to St. John Chrysostom, whose homilies Innocent had studied closely from his student years, followed him so consistently that he came to be called, simply, “the Russian Chrysostom.” He was elected a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1841.

His years at Kherson were not merely ceremonial. Alongside the search for the site of St. Vladimir’s baptism at Chersonesus, he took a direct hand in reviving several older monastic communities across the Crimean peninsula that had fallen into neglect, treating the recovery of holy places as continuous with the recovery of the monastic life once lived around them. His health, strained for years by the pace of his preaching and administrative labor, failed further during the Crimean War, when he remained active in the Sevastopol region rather than withdraw to safety; he died at Kherson on the feast of Pentecost, May 25, 1857. Innocent was locally glorified in 1997, entered the wider calendar of the Russian Orthodox Church in 2005, and was given a church-wide feast in 2017; he is commemorated on June 7.

2. The Work: Occasion and Purpose

Innocent wrote The Last Days of the Earthly Life of Jesus Christ while still in his twenties, before his consecration as a bishop, during his years of teaching in St. Petersburg. It reached its first readers as a serial, chapter by chapter, across 1826–1828, in the pages of Christian Reading, the journal of the St. Petersburg Theological Academy. Each installment was read eagerly and widely—an early account of his life records that copies of the issues carrying it were quickly gone. The work later earned its author the doctorate in theology under which he was made rector at Kiev.

Its purpose is stated by its method more than by any preface: to follow the Gospel narrative of Christ’s final days—from the last journey up from Galilee to the guard set at the sealed tomb—paragraph by paragraph, drawing on Scripture and on the Fathers, but also on the geography of Judea, the customs of first-century Jewish life, and the findings of the biblical scholarship of Innocent’s own day, so that a reader could follow the events as a single continuous history, unfolding across real places and real institutions. It was written, in short, to let an educated Russian reader of the 1820s walk Holy Week as nearly as a book could arrange, informed as well as moved.

3. Argument and Structure

The book unfolds in twenty-nine chapters, moving in strict chronological order. It opens with a survey of Christ’s public ministry considered specifically as a preparation for what follows (chapter 1), then narrates the last journey from Galilee to Jerusalem (2), the raising of Lazarus and its consequences (3), the triumphal entry (4), the cursing of the fig tree and the cleansing of the Temple (5), the Sanhedrin’s public delegation to Jesus (6), the confounding of the Jewish sects before the people (7), and the close of His public ministry as Messiah (8). Two chapters then turn to the Olivet discourse on the fate of Jerusalem and the last days of the world, including a chapter examining how far its prophecies had already been fulfilled (9–10). The narrative proper of the Passion begins with Judas’s betrayal (11), the washing of the feet and the Last Supper (12), and the farewell discourse (13).

Chapter 14, on the Gethsemane struggle, is the hinge of the whole work. Innocent devotes it to the meaning of the agony for the work of redemption, the nature of the interior temptation Christ underwent, its threefold prayer over the cup, the sleeping of the disciples, and the bloody sweat and the strengthening angel (Lk 22:43–44). From there the book follows the arrest and the two trials before the Sanhedrin (15–17), a chapter on the fate of Judas (18), the trials before Pilate and Herod (19–20), the condemnation to scourging and death (21), and a reflective chapter surveying the trial’s whole irregular course (22). The crucifixion itself, Christ’s sayings from the cross, the penitent thief, the miraculous signs at His death, and the final events at Calvary occupy five chapters (23–27), and the book closes with the taking-down and burial (28) and the setting of the guard at the tomb (29). Each narrative chapter carries its own extended excursus—historical, geographical, or doctrinal—and the whole is supported by an apparatus of two hundred and five notes of citation and comment.

The excursuses are where Innocent’s second, scholarly register comes forward. A chapter on the triumphal entry pauses to work out the topography of the road down from Bethany and the crowd’s likely vantage points; the chapter on the cursing of the fig tree turns to the agricultural calendar of Judea to explain a detail that has puzzled readers of the Gospel since antiquity; the chapters on the trials weigh the Sanhedrin’s own procedural law against what the Gospels record actually happening that night, to show precisely where the proceedings broke it. The two hundred and five endnotes that close the book carry the citations behind these excursuses—patristic commentators such as Chrysostom and Theophylact, but also the Talmudic and rabbinic scholarship of writers like Schoettgen and Lightfoot, and contemporary works of biblical geography and criticism such as Bertholdt’s introduction to the New Testament and Friedrich’s study of Samaritan Christology. A reader who wants only the story can read past them without loss; a reader who wants to check a claim or follow a citation further will find the note waiting at the back of the book.

A few chapters mark deliberate pauses in the narrative for the sake of a single problem rather than a running commentary. “A Look at (the Manner of) the Fulfillment of the Prophecies concerning the Fate of Jerusalem,” set immediately after the Olivet discourse, steps back from the story to weigh how far its predictions had already come to pass in Innocent’s own century and how a reader ought to read prophecy still unfulfilled. “A Look at the Manner of Jesus Christ’s Trial,” placed just after the sentence of scourging and death, does the same for the legal proceedings, gathering into one place what the preceding chapters had shown piecemeal about where the Sanhedrin and Pilate each departed from their own law. A third such pause, on the penitent thief, takes up a single verse of Luke’s Gospel and turns it over at length as a case study in the reach of Christ’s mercy at the very moment of His own agony. These review chapters give the book its double rhythm—narrative advancing chapter by chapter, then arrested every so often for a chapter of reflection before it resumes.

4. Theological and Spiritual Significance

The book’s distinguishing habit—illustrating the Gospel narrative from the history, geography, and antiquities of the Holy Land alongside Scripture and the Fathers—has been credited with anticipating the approach that later, better-known nineteenth-century Lives of Christ, among them the works of Frederic Farrar, Alfred Edersheim, Cyrus Geikie, and Henri Didon, would each take up for a much wider international readership. Innocent had no such readership in view; he wrote for Russian believers who already knew the Gospel story and wanted to see it more exactly, not to persuade skeptics of its truth.

The habit is theological in its effect even where it looks merely antiquarian. By pausing over the road down from Bethany, the agricultural calendar behind the barren fig tree, or the precise procedure a Sanhedrin trial was bound to follow, Innocent keeps insisting that these events happened to a particular man in a particular place, on a particular afternoon, under laws and customs that a scholar could still recover and check. The historical detail is not offered for its own interest; it is offered so that the reader cannot quietly soften the Gospel narrative into a timeless parable and must instead reckon with it as an event that took place, once, in history.

What the historical detail serves, chapter after chapter, is a sustained meditation on the reality of Christ’s suffering—that the Son of God truly hungered, truly wept, truly agonized in the garden, and truly died—set against His unbroken freedom throughout the Passion, most sharply at Gethsemane, where Innocent reads the threefold prayer as the Lord’s own free and deliberate acceptance of “the cup” His Father had given Him (Jn 18:11). Alongside that meditation runs a second, quieter argument built from the human actors who surround Christ in these chapters—Judas, the chief priests, the sleeping disciples, Pilate, Peter weeping bitterly after his denial, and the thief who repents within sight of his own cross—in whom Innocent finds displayed, side by side, human nature at its worst, at its most ordinary, and, in Christ alone, at its best.

Because the book was conceived to walk step by step through the days of Holy Week themselves, its argument is built for use as much as for reading straight through. A reader following it during Holy Week finds each liturgical day supplied with its own chapter: the upper room and Gethsemane for Great and Holy Thursday, the trials and the cross for Great and Holy Friday, the tomb and its guard for Great and Holy Saturday. That correspondence between the book’s chapters and the Church’s own commemoration of these events was, for Innocent’s first readers, as much the point as any single doctrine he argued; the book asks to be prayed with as much as read.

5. Reception and Influence

The book’s two receptions, at the level of the ordinary reader and at the level of ecclesiastical authority, pulled in opposite directions from the start. Readers of Christian Reading welcomed each installment; church authority around Metropolitan Filaret (Drozdov) of Moscow met it with suspicion, on the charge of “neologism”—an overly free or rationalizing method thought unsuited to sacred history—and the resulting scrutiny delayed a complete, standalone edition of the book by roughly three decades. It eventually took its settled place among Innocent’s collected works, and the Russian text underlying this translation is drawn from the second edition of that collection (St. Petersburg, 1908, vol. 5).

Later theological assessment has remained divided in substance, if gentler in tone. The historian Georges Florovsky judged the book, in Ways of Russian Theology, to be “a work of literature, not theology,” faulting it for staying within the bounds of what he called rhetorical and sentimental humanism—a severe verdict, and one some later readers have thought too severe for a work whose method, whatever its rhetorical color, a generation of far more celebrated Life-of-Christ writers would go on to adopt. Across nearly two centuries of that argument, ordinary readers have kept the book steadily in print.

6. The Text and This Edition

This is a fresh modern English translation, rendered directly from Innocent’s own Russian as it stands in the second edition of his collected works (St. Petersburg, 1908, vol. 5), digitized at azbyka.ru. It is a standalone English edition, not a parallel or bilingual one. Scripture quoted within the work is translated afresh from Innocent’s own Church-Slavonic and Synodal-Russian quotation rather than conformed to the wording of any existing English Bible, so that a reader hears the verse as Innocent himself was reading it. Following house convention, the saint is named plainly as the book’s author, with his hierarchical and venerable title carried separately from the byline; Royal Archives serves this edition as translator and editor, not as author.

In Innocent’s Russian, the book’s apparatus of two hundred and five citation and comment notes runs on directly from the final narrative chapter—“The Guard”—with no structural break marking where the narrative ends and the notes begin. This edition separates the two at render time: the twenty-ninth chapter closes with its own narrative, and the notes that followed it in the source are presented in full as a Notes section in the back matter, so a reader can finish the story of the guard at the tomb without the citation apparatus intervening, while every note remains available entire for anyone who wants it. One paragraph of that apparatus is repeated twice, word for word, in Innocent’s own text; this edition prints it once and records the repetition here as an editorial decision, rather than silently duplicating or silently deleting the source’s own error. A saying attributed, within the Gethsemane chapter, to St. Augustine has likewise not been traced to any specific work of his; it is carried here exactly as Innocent quotes it, unverified against a critical edition of Augustine’s own writings.

7. Suggestions for Reading

The book rewards reading in step with Holy Week itself: the chapters on the Last Supper, the farewell discourse, and Gethsemane on Great and Holy Thursday; the trials and crucifixion on Great and Holy Friday; the burial and the guard at the tomb on Great and Holy Saturday. A reader who prefers to move straight through the narrative may treat the notes as a reference section to be consulted chapter by chapter rather than read start to finish—Innocent wrote them for the reader who wants to check a source or follow up a detail, not as a second book to be read alongside the first.

The three review chapters—on the fulfillment of prophecy, on the manner of the trial, and on the penitent thief—can also be read on their own, apart from the surrounding narrative, by a reader who wants a single sustained treatment of one question rather than the ongoing story. And a reader returning to the book across several Holy Weeks will likely find, as Innocent’s first readers did, that the chapters read differently each time: what strikes a first-time reader as historical detail settles, on a second or third pass, into the theological argument the detail was quietly building all along.